Wyoming campaign cuts volunteer who set up phony Web address for rival candidate’s Web site

Wyoming campaign cuts volunteer behind Web trick

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — A Wyoming gubernatorial candidate has cut ties with a volunteer who used a bit of online trickery to misdirect people trying to visit her opponent’s Web site.

Republican candidate Rita Meyer said she had been unaware of Paul Montoya’s decision to register a Web address very similar to rival Republican candidate Matt Mead’s Web site.

The trick, which followed a similar campaign prank in California, temporarily resulted in visitors to mattmeadforgovernor.com being directed to Meyer’s Web site. As of Wednesday, the address had been switched to link to Mead’s site, meadforgovernor.com.

“Technology’s good, but (Montoya) absolutely used it for the wrong means and ends, and I don’t support that,” Meyer said. “I was very saddened because it reflects on the campaign.”

Montoya did not return an Associated Press phone message left at his office Wednesday; online directories didn’t list a Cheyenne residential phone number for him. Montoya is a managing partner of Extreme Highspeed Inc., a Cheyenne-based Internet service provider, according to the company’s Web site.

Montoya told Cheyenne TV station KGWN on Tuesday that the ruse wasn’t a prank but was meant to demonstrate the importance of securing pertinent domain names.

“I’m an emerging technology advocate, and one of the things I’d really like people to watch out for is to protect themselves about what they have,” Montoya said.

“It wasn’t meant to be malicious by any means,” he added. “It was basically to punctuate how important it is to own the domain you have.”

Mead said he first learned about the phony Web address Sunday from supporters. He discussed it with Meyer that evening at a chamber of commerce meeting in Buffalo, he said.

“She said she didn’t know about it and wouldn’t do something like that, and I took her at her word,” Mead said.

Mead, a former U.S. attorney for Wyoming, said Wednesday that he didn’t need an Internet lesson from Montoya.

“I, as U.S. attorney, of course prosecuted a number of people who misused technology for credit card fraud, bank fraud, child pornography, so I didn’t think I really needed a lesson in technology from him,” Mead said.

Another trick involving politics and the Internet happened in California, where a congressional campaign took advantage of a typo on a rival candidate’s Web site to redirect a link.

The Orange County Register reported Tuesday that U.S. Rep. John Campbell’s home page linked to campbellforcongres.com, with only one “s.”

Melahat Rafiei, campaign manager for Campbell challenger Beth Krom, said an intern noticed the error in November. Krom supporters then bought the misspelled domain name and redirected it to Krom’s campaign Web site, Rafiei said.

Rafiei said she clicked the link every morning to see if it was still up because it made her day.

Campbell’s campaign said it fixed the link this week after the Register reported the problem in its politics blog.